Christie Tate
Where’s the Beef?: Hamburgers, Disordered Eating, and the Lone Star State
During a lull in a group therapy session one morning, Jessica turned to our therapist and said, “If I invite Christie out for a burger, am I being codependent?”
I have no idea how our therapist answered because my brain froze. There’s a blank white screen in my memory where his answer should be—the same white screen that appears every time I hear the universe shout like a hardened, big-city detective: Busted!
And I was. Also, I was confused because we hadn’t been talking about hamburgers—we’d been talking about another member’s relationship with her grown daughter. Plus, I had no recollection of discussing my relationship to the great American hot sandwich with Jessica. My no-hamburger rule was one of the last vestiges of the regime known as Christie’s Active Eating Disorder. So long standing was this rule that I forgot it was a rule. After all these years—at least 40—I’d fallen for the official story. I don’t like hamburgers. Never mind that sometimes when my son orders a double with cheese from Five Guys, my mouth literally tingles with the urge to sink my teeth into the edge where the excess meat and cheese stick out over the edge of the bun. But that was private; Jessica definitely didn’t know about that!
The trick of group therapy is that ideas—thought experiments, if you will—get tossed around during the session like they’re no big deal. But if you’ve been there long enough you know that what is getting tossed around is your own resistance, which will soon disintegrate. And that thought experiment? It eventually becomes an action you take out in the real world even though you’re scared. Your resistance becomes something like deep curiosity, an itch of the bone: What if I did? What if I ate a hamburger?
When Jessica asked her question, I didn’t react, mostly because of the white screen blanketing my consciousness. I knew, thanks to my lengthy tenure in group therapy, to keep my face neutral because the bigger your reaction, the more you will draw attention, effectively proving that you have an issue to work on. If you’re so chill about hamburgers, then why are you screaming at us? The last thing I wanted was these seven people crawling around my relationship to all-beef patties on sesame seed buns. So I smiled, exuded peace. Nothing to see here. I might have opened my palms and gestured to Jessica like go ahead, meant to convey this was her therapeutic moment—her chance to explore her compulsion to fix other people. Had I not been carrying years of ambivalence that was slowly churning into panic about the food item in question, I might have said something like, “What would it mean to you if we ate hamburgers together?”
At the school cafeteria in Dallas, where I grew up, they served hamburgers every Wednesday, while the other days rotated among grilled cheese, ravioli, fish sticks, and square pizza dotted with charred sausage nubs. My family ate hamburgers for dinner at least once a week—McDonald’s and Burger King, but also a local joint called Cactus Jack’s that served crinkle cut fries. My mother loves a burger, especially those grilled over charcoal. I don’t know why, but the patties we had at home were always several inches thick and had a much smaller diameter than the buns. If you’re picturing a hockey puck, that’s not right. Think of an eight-ball on a pool table.
I remember watching my dad flipping patties on the patio one night and asking him why our patties were so thick when the ones at McDonald’s and Wendy’s were so much thinner.
“This is just how they come out when we make them at home.” This made sense to me at the time, but later, when I lived on my own and prepared my own food, I looked back and wondered: Why didn’t they smash the patties down even just a little bit?
In my parents, I sensed a lack of agency around food. Mom claimed she hated cooking and recycled the recipes she inherited from her mother with an air of I can’t believe ya’ll want to eat dinner again tonight. Dad professed incompetence, which might account for why he never pressed his steel spatula into the patties so they’d fit on a standard-sized bun.
I don’t remember when I became phobic about hamburgers. By my early teens, my dysfunctional ideas reigned. Thank you, Seventeen Magazine, heroin chic, and my extracurricular activity of choice: Ballet.
When a Chili’s opened near my house in eighth grade, everyone went nuts over the hamburger, called The Old Fashioned. The first few times we went to eat there, people waiting for tables spilled out into the parking lot. We usually bailed if a wait was longer than 15 minutes, but at Chili’s we’d wait for almost an hour. My parents always split an Old Fashioned with cheese and a basket of fries.
“I don’t like hamburgers,” I’d say, shaking my head when they’d hold it out for me to take a bite. I was not a worldly eighth grader, but I knew that a juicy beef burger on a buttery bun was full of calories. I pictured it tasting like nothing—Styrofoam—or something gross like liver and onions. That was one of my tricks: to convince myself that fattening foods didn’t taste delicious.
One Friday during the spring of eighth grade, my friend Michelle and I planned to have dinner at Chili’s. “Let’s say the Apostle’s Creed between each bite,” I suggested, testing her reaction to my latest diet strategy. If she thought it was strange that I wanted to recite a long prayer summarizing the core beliefs of the Catholic faith a dozen times during our meal, she didn’t say so.
We slid into a booth, and she suggested splitting the Old Fashioned. I balked. “Can we do fajitas? The tortillas come in a covered dish.”
“Fine,” she said, “but no prayers.”
No hamburgers for me. Ever. I never read that section of a menu or snuck a bite from my siblings’ plate; I just pretended they didn’t exist. But it can’t be simply that they were guilty of the high crime of the 1980s: being fattening. I’ve reacquainted myself with so many foods that I’d cast into that gulag. I’ve ordered pasta with heavy cream sauce. I’ve eaten an almond croissant in a Paris bakery. I’ve consumed a fully dressed Cesar salad. I’ve enjoyed crème brûlée, stuffed pizza, loaded baked potatoes, General Tso’s chicken, Thanksgiving stuffing, key lime pie. I wasn’t sure why I held out on the hamburger.
Jessica intuited my food rigidity because she has plenty of her own. Before she joined our therapy group, she’d checked herself into in-patient treatment for anorexia. Today, she’s in recovery from starving herself, so she’s fully aware how rules around food can snuff out so much—potentially your whole life.
But, but, but. I’m not new here! I joined the Twelve-Step food program in 1992, two years after Jessica was born. I’ve gone on to have a mostly sane—to the extent that any American woman can claim sanity—relationship to food. I eat almost everything. I’ve given birth to two babies, both of whom I fed with my breasts. Food doesn’t stop me from showing up at social events, though sometimes I have to scale a wall of anxiety when I have zero control over what’s being served. When I eat out for lunch, I might twitch a bit if I also have plans to eat out for dinner on the same day. If I’m honest, I wish I ate less sugar and struggled way less with body dysmorphia. Overall, my story is mostly one of progress and expansion. My life is full, the list of foods I won’t eat is nearly empty, save for this one food item.
Internally, I stamp my foot: What in my life is going to change if I eat a damn hamburger?
What’s the harm in finding out? Jessica wants to know.
By my sophomore year in high school, I’d gone a few years without eating a burger. I didn’t miss them, probably because I was preoccupied with hiding my bulimia, striving for the honor roll, and earning ballet solos. I carried a few extra pounds on my frame, enough to merit a scolding from my pediatrician, but to my eyes, I was morbidly obese, which meant no hamburgers. This was years before I understood that the rule—like the bulimia and dieting—was about control, not about losing weight.
When my best friend Lia and I stopped for dinner one night on a road trip to Houston, she ordered a burger after a long conversation with the waiter about medium versus medium-well.
“I’ll take the chopped salad with chicken. Dressing on the side,” I said. When Harry Met Sally had just come out and jokes about fussy eaters asking for an undressed salad were all the rage. I braced myself Lia narrowed her eyes at me.
“You know,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “I’ve never seen you eat a burger.” Her tone suggested curiosity not mockery.
I felt the warm glow of being seen by someone who loved me. Shame too, for having a food rule that wasn’t getting me any thinner. Lia never complained about the size of her body, and why would she? She was lithe and strong from cross country and cheerleading. She was allowed to eat a burger. I wasn’t like her. I was something else, something deviant, a girl gone wrong.
“I don’t like them,” I said. “Too much meat.”
I’ve said it hundreds of times: “Too much meat, and I don’t like the taste.” I mostly meant it. The greasy flavor and nubby texture of ground red meat aren’t my favorite. The dripping juice is so unbecoming.
You can say you don’t eat red meat anywhere, and no one will think you have an eating disorder. It’s perfectly logical to dislike red meat. It causes heart attacks! It’s not healthy! The industrial beef complex is destroying the planet! And before beef production was linked to the climate crisis, there was mad cow disease. Remember that? Oprah does. In April 1996, on an episode of her show, she delved into food safety, including comments from a vegetarian and animal rights activist named Howard Lyman, who predicted that the lethal mad-cow disease would show up in U.S. beef production. Oprah said that Lyman’s prediction “just stopped me cold from eating another burger. I’m stopped.” The Texas beef industry wasn’t having it and sued Winfrey in a case that went to trial in Amarillo. Winfrey temporarily relocated to Texas during the six-week trial and hired a slew of Texans for her defense team, including a jury consultant named Phil McGraw, who went on to world-wide fame as Dr. Phil.
But I’m not Oprah Winfrey. This essay will have zero effect on the price of cattle. No one gives a shit if I eat a burger.
Except Jessica. She smelled a food rule, and, yes, she’d deeply codependent, but she wanted me to be free.
Over the years, I’ve marveled when a skinny person eats a hamburger. Specifically, when a skinny woman eats one. I find myself gaping at them as they pick it up and bite into it. It’s wonder to me—like seeing a flower turn into a unicorn or watching the moon grow legs and dance across the sky. It’s how do you do that? It’s me crashing headfirst into my toxic ideas about bodies and food and who gets to eat what.
My husband’s stepmother is a slight woman in her eighties and the slowest eater I’ve ever broken bread with. Once, when visiting her home in Las Vegas, we brought over In & Out burgers for her and the kids. Nibble by nibble, it took her over 45 minutes to eat her double-patty with cheese. For 44 of those minutes, I watched her like she was an Instagram reel, not our beloved step-grandmother eating her lunch on the patio.
I did the same thing to my sister, who’s always been many pounds thinner than I am. (I’m not a reliable narrator, but here’s a data point: When I was at my thinnest in the mid-1990’s and she was her normal weight, I borrowed a Banana Republic skirt from her, and it was a size zero. I would guess she could still wear that skirt today, while I could very much not fit into it.) My sister and I went to dinner one night in Austin at an outdoor restaurant famous for its queso dip and the live-oak tree growing through the middle of its outdoor seating area. This must have been the early aughts, and I ordered my usual—chopped salad with grilled chicken, dressing on the side—and she ordered a cheeseburger. She too is a nibbler—when our food arrived it was dusk, when she was done with half the burger, the night sky was all ink and shadows. She made it look so natural. What, you just order the burger and then sit on the picnic bench and enjoy it? Really?
Moments like that prove that my food rules are utter bullshit. I wasn’t ready to do anything about it at the time, but her burger was a major blow. The shattering was coming.
After Jessica asked her question in group, we dropped the subject for several weeks, though I continued to ruminate. “Ruminate,” from the Latin word ruminare, means “to chew repeatedly for an extended amount of time” or to “turn over in the mind.” A cow is a ruminant animal that chews its cud.
What would it feel like to eat a hamburger?
What was I missing by keeping them out of my life?
What if I liked it?
Would I have to eat more?
What if it made me feel gross and greasy for days afterward?
What if it made me gain weight?
What would be special about me if I ate everything just like everyone else?
What if it smelled weird?
What if I was still hungry after I’d eaten it?
What if the grease made my skin break out?
At the beginning of the summer, I grew tired of my rumination. I was making too much of this. I texted Jessica.
Me: If I’m doing this, it better be a good, quality burger. No White Castle.
Jessica: Ew. No. We’ll go to Small Cheval. So good.
Me: I’m not ready, yet. But soon.
It has something to do with femininity. Of all the foods I’ve classified, counted, prohibited, rationed, and forbidden, the hamburger is most tied to gender for me. It seems like a food that guys eat. Dudes. Men. Where did this come from when I have a mother, sister, and now daughter, who enjoy a burger now and then?
But, to me, a burger feels like the ultimate bro food, the perfect repast for Texas fraternity guys in their backwards trucker hats and shit-kicker boots.
In college, I dated a fraternity guy who liked smoking pot more than going to class. He’d eat one meal a day, usually a Whopper or an Ultimate Cheeseburger from Jack-in-the-Box. He’d unwrap it halfway and eat the exposed part in three bites. Then off with the wrapper and the rest would disappear in another three bites. Sometimes, he kept his dip in his lower lip while he ate. We’d cruise around in his Corolla, watching the Texas sun defy the horizon. I’d stare out the window, unsure if I felt lonely or hungry, unwilling to ask for a bite or for some food of my own. How would any guy like a girl who actually wanted to eat?
“I think it has something to do with Texas,” I blurted out to my friend Max over coffee.
Suddenly, it was so clear to me. Beef was a stand-in for my home state, the one I’d been trying to reckon with since I left in 1996. The reconciliation wasn’t getting any easier as the Lone Star State kept pissing me off, year after year. “George W. Bush and Iraq, Tom DeLay and redistricting, Ted Cruz and the tea party—an impressive bill of particulars that has contributed to the national malaise,” as Lawrence Wright described in God Save Texas. In my consciousness, burgers and Texas had merged—all my ambivalence was baked into my feelings about the most American of dishes, even though the burger likely originated in Hamburg, Germany. Burgers as synecdoche. They stood for everything that drove me out of Texas: fraternity bros, misogynist good old boys, conservative politics, toxic gender norms, and my shame that I couldn’t figure out how to eat in Texas without self-induced vomiting, while the other women in my family managed just fine.
“No shit, Christie.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a two-hour wait,” the twenty-something hostess said. I shouldn’t have been surprised, there were people milling all over the sidewalk, hovering by the outdoor seating. The scene made the Chili’s in 1980’s north Dallas look like a ghost town. “Do you want to put your name in?” She held an iPad with a list of nearly thirty names on it.
“Sure,” I said sure and then called Jessica. “You cool to eat at nine?”
“Oh no, you’re at the wrong location!” Jessica laughed. “I’m on Lake Street. There’s no line.”
“I’m coming.” I had to laugh that I’d gotten the location wrong, a mistake that hinted at my ongoing ambivalence. For God’s sake, I needed to eat this burger and get on with my life.
The thick air flattened my hair and moistened my skin. My sandals rubbed a blister on my right ankle as I walked almost a mile to Jessica, but I ignored it. I was getting to this meal if I had to crawl on my hands and knees.
Thank God, the menu at Small Cheval menu consists of three items: Burgers, fries, and sodas. No chopped salad in sight. No salad at all.
“What do you get?” I asked Jessica, wishing I was playing the role of mentor. She had come from a private Pilates class. Her hair was gathered in a messy ponytail that stuck out of a black baseball cap that matched her expensive black exercise clothes. Her nails were painted in her signature bright red, and her skin glowed, flawless and youthful.
“I get the cheeseburger and fries. All the burgers come with double patties.”
“Seems excessive.”
We placed our orders and stepped back to wait for the guy behind the counter to call our numbers.
“It smells good,” I said.
I wanted to ask Jessica about the lurid details of her eating disorder. I didn’t, though, because I recognized it as a power play to establish myself as the healthier of the two of us. I knew enough about her story that she’d combined cocaine and starvation, which meant that her ED was both more expensive and more dangerous than my garden variety vomiting after bingeing on food I’d stolen from my college dining hall. Stop that. I recognized my pernicious habit of comparing my suffering to someone else’s. I inhaled deeply and let it go.
“Thirteen!”
The guy behind the counter slid Jessica’s basket of food toward her and then handed her mine too. “Here’s your mother’s.”
My eyes widened at the insinuation. Jessica sputtered and said, “No, no, she’s not—she’s my friend.” Sweet codependent Jessica. I couldn’t let her twist in her guilt. Who cares if the burger guy thinks I’m her mother? I could be.
“Let me help you, darling,” I said, giving an exaggerated Faye Dunaway impression for comedic effect.
We carried our baskets and sat outside next to the elevated train tracks on Lake Street. I unwrapped the foil and admired the oozing cheese, the puff of steam. It smelled like summer in Texas and a thousand bar-b-ques where I’d begged off a burger and loaded my plate with coleslaw and chips.
The first bite was too hot to taste, but I could feel the crisp edges of the meat, the gooey coating of cheese. I used a flimsy plastic knife to cut it in half. The next two bites, taken after a few moments of cooling, were softer than I imagined and more flavorful—greasy beef that filled my mouth was like salted earth. My mind flashed to a memory of standing at my grandparents’ farm, watching a dozen Holstein cows loll under the shade of an oak tree on the other side of a barbed wire fence. I never felt so attached to the cows that I vowed to become a vegetarian, but I was attached to my grandparents who discussed the price of cattle every morning at the breakfast table. I swallowed the bite in my mouth with something like gratitude that this meal—this hamburger—had opened a portal to a Texas farmhouse where a city grandkid spooned Cream of Wheat into her mouth while her grandparents perseverated about whether the livestock would cover the bills this month.
With each bite, the bun yielded easily, and my mouth filled with meat, cheese, and bread. Good ratios. I entertained a fleeting wish for a pickle.
Thank God Jessica made normal conversation with me, not asking after every bite, “You good? Are you okay?” I wouldn’t have been able to stomach any cloying concern. We talked about our shopping habits, our group therapy mates, and our fathers. If you strolled by, you would have seen two women—one young and one middle-aged (maybe a mother-daughter pair)—having dinner on a warm summer night.
I wasn’t roiling inside. I didn’t mentally vow to eat vegan for the next four days or plan to return the next day for round two. I felt like I needed a hot shower but that was from the late-summer humidity not the burger. I didn’t hate it or myself. I quite enjoyed the whole experience.
On the long walk back to my car, I puzzled over whether it was a big deal or not, this burger I’d eaten. I hadn’t forced the memories of my grandparents’ farm, but I’m not sure how I get to the edge of that barbed wire fence without the burger. My grandmother from the farm loved hamburgers—she’d take us to Dairy Queen or a little hamburger stand in Waxahachie, Texas, where she’d order hers with extra mustard, the bright yellow kind that would punch the back of your throat and make your eyes water. I welcomed the memories of people I loved who’d been gone for more than half my lifetime. When I got to my car, I texted my burger-loving children. Hey, I know where we can get a great burger sometime. I could picture their surprise at this turn of events. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell them all about it.
Christie Tate is an essayist and author in Chicago who writes about mental health, recovery, group therapy, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, Texas, and religion. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review, Carve Magazine, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut memoir, Group, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 19 languages. Her second memoir, BFF, was a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.